Our Process

Using Agile with Guardrails To Create the Best Results

What does Agile With Guardrails mean for you? Our process is flexible enough to grow and change as you discover more about what you need—but structured and predictable enough to help us, and you, stick to a set scope, budget, and timeline: In short, no surprises.

The Timeline

Our team meets with you weekly to demo the results of each iteration (also known as a sprint) or to plan the following sprint. This collaborative approach allows you to give feedback and input that will shape future iterations, which ultimately leads to the best solution for your business.

The Results

Perhaps the greatest benefit of the agile process is that it challenges the way your processes currently work. Other methodologies simply deliver an automated version of what you already have, which may be slow or outdated. Agile allows you to discover new and better ways to conduct your business and improve your efficiency and effectiveness.

Take a close look.

See more details at every stage of the process.

Discovery

At the outset of each project, we dive deep into understanding your business and processes. Our developers will look into what you currently do, how you do it, and what you’re ultimately hoping to accomplish. The result of this phase is a requirements document that sets the direction and core objectives of the project.

Development

Our developers then begin developing the basic functionality you need. One of the beauties of the agile process is you don’t have to wait 6 months or a year to start seeing results of the development. Agile breaks up the entire development process into 2 week chunks (called sprints) that allow you to see the progressive development of your new system.

Presentation

Every week our team meets with you to demo the results of each sprint or to plan the next sprint.

Feedback

Once you’ve seen the functionality, our team collects feedback, modifications, and new features and functionality that you want to incorporate. This allows you the flexibility to not know all of the answers right up front, but to allow them to come about in an evolutionary, progressive fashion.

Improvement

Our team then takes your feedback and incorporates it into the next development iteration. We then transition back into the next sprint and repeat the process.

Deployment

The strength of agile is that you often can launch a better system earlier than normal. By having you involved throughout the entire development process, you will receive a much more effective software solution and because you are developing a working product throughout the process, you can stop development and deploy early if it satisfactorily meets your needs and expectations.

The Philosophy Behind Our Process

No matter what project we work on, there is one driving question that pushes us: “what’s possible?”

01

Listen, listen, listen.

We can’t know how to help you without a thorough understanding of your business—understanding what you do and how you do it. So we might spend extra time with you on the factory floor or talking to your extended leadership team. We’ll definitely take the time to get it right, to get to know you, your business, and how you use your software.

02

Program for people.

It’s easy to write a program for a computer; it’s much harder to write for people. We believe that Innovation is a social process, fueled by human interaction. New technologies are born by watching how real people interact, how they talk and work together, the stories they tell each other. That’s why great teams get great results with great custom software.

03

Do what matters.

All of this conversation helps us to see the big picture, strategize, and do what matters. Taking time upfront to listen and talk to your team members helps us create the best possible custom software at the most affordable price. At every decision point in your project, we question ourselves about cost to value ratio, and we won’t ever push extra features that nobody needs or bells and whistles that don’t impact ROI. Simple is smart.

04

Process can’t substitute thought.

While we love our process—and have seen it consistently deliver high value at a controlled cost for our clients—we aren’t automatons, mindlessly following a prescribed routine. To us, each project is a unique challenge. A new chance to stretch our capabilities, redefine and test the limits of custom software development, and get better at what we do. We understand that what worked for one client won’t necessarily work for another. So we design, develop, test, reflect, figure out what’s working, and then design, develop, and test again.

Let’s Work Together

We believe you’ll discover a unique difference between our team and most custom software development firms. Much like them, our first few years, we were simply working hard “in the business.” However, after two decades, the business is in us.